The present invention relates to 3D shape modeling.
An open problem in computer vision since early works on optical flow has been to determine the shape of an object with unknown reflectance undergoing differential motion, when observed by a static camera under unknown illumination.
Shape from differential motion is solved under the umbrella of optical flow methods. They rely on brightness constancy assumptions, such as assuming that the local brightness of an image point does not change with variation in lighting and viewing configuration (which is obviously incorrect from a physical point of view). Shape reconstruction methods that account for this variation in brightness attempt to model the image formation as a diffuse reflection, which is inaccurate for most real-world objects.